Copper’s Care; Public Welfare, Paternalism, and Worker Expression in a Michigan Company Town
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2023
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Haverford College. Department of History
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Thesis
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eng
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Abstract
This thesis aims to investigate paternalism of the Calumet and Hecla Consolidated Copper Mining Corporation (C&H) through the built environment of Calumet, Michigan, by analyzing the town’s school, library, hospital, and theater between 1870 and 1930. It investigates four “branches” of corporate control—social paternalism, economic paternalism, moral paternalism, and spectacular paternalism—and focuses on one branch for each building. Social paternalism can be understood as C&H’s attempt to control the lives of its workers “from cradle to grave.” In this spirit, C&H tracked the ethnicities of the Washington School’s student body, and used spaces of industrial training to craft a cohort of Americanized laborers perfectly suited to company needs. Economic paternalism is the idea that communal gifts ought to be deployed rationally, with scientific precision. This self-interested analysis was exemplified by the Calumet library, where every book was screened to weed out those which might have encouraged dissident politics, or threatened the business’ bottom line. Moral paternalism is broadly defined as the idea that C&H leveraged built space to shape lived moralities in its favor. Through the C&H Miners’ Hospital, for example, the company was able to reframe violence generated by its own extractive industry as a culture of communal care. Finally, spectacular paternalism was a paternalism of edifice and aesthetics; exemplified in the shining copper chandelier and illumination of the Calumet Theater, this branch acted as a visual progress narrative, one which argued that C&H’s industry—and copper more broadly—was an engine of advancement and modernity for Calumet’s citizens. The thesis also traces wider histories of C&H’s rise and fall, including the formation of the company under President Alexander Agassiz, the 1913 copper district strike, and the subsequent decline of the region’s industrialism. Finally, this thesis strives to go beyond the bare metrics of spatial control in Calumet, elevating instead detailed readings of the everyday resistance and reoccupation which chafed against the grain of company purpose, challenging and reoccupying corporate space.